Engineering, Leadership, and Life

I write about software engineering, leadership, and the judgment built through messy systems, team decisions, mistakes, and curiosity beyond work.

10 min read

When Too Many Maps Overlap on One Person

You have a proposal. And someone suggested checking with Mike. It does not sound like a problem. It sounds like due diligence, like someone being careful, like a team that knows...

6 min read

The Work Runs on Different Maps

A project can be obviously important, technically sound, budgeted, and still go nowhere. I don’t mean slowness. I mean the weird kind of stalled where everyone involved can poin...

6 min read

Breaking Up With WordPress After Two Decades

Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more...

4 min read

Your Work Introduces You

Years ago, when I first joined Tripadvisor, we had a tool that moved data to Amazon Redshift. One of the engineers went on holiday, the tool had a few bugs, and people were bloc...

9 min read

Trial By Fire

Teams spend months hiring a strong candidate. Sourcing, interviews, debriefs, approvals, compensation, notice period. Everyone treats the hire like a serious investment. Then th...